The Times-Picayune of New Orleans just profiled Mark Plotkin of Amazon Conservation Team. The piece talks about how “growing up, Plotkin never imagined he would one day become an ethnobotanist, studying the ways Indians used the plants that grew around them. ‘How could I?’ I never knew there was such a thing,’ he said.”

It talks about the defining moment that changed all that, and later led to the founding of the Amazon Conservation Team and all his success. It ends with Mark’s humor.

An excerpt:

“In 1996, he and his wife, Liliana Madrigal, cofounded the nonprofit Amazon Conservation Team to protect biological and cultural diversity in the tropical rain forest, and started the program Shamans and Apprentices, which helps medicine men share their priceless knowledge with young members of their tribes. Nearly two decades later, the program is flourishing.

‘It’s not just working, it’s thriving,’ he said. ‘I’m immensely proud of that.’ Plotkin has led a remarkable life. He has degrees from Harvard and Yale, and a doctorate in biological conservation from Tufts University. In 1998, he starred in the IMAX film ‘Amazon.’ He has won numerous awards, and in 2005, for Smithsonian magazine’s 35th anniversary issue, he was picked as one of ’35 Who Made a Difference,’ along with such luminaries as Bill Gates and Wynton Marsalis…

In recent years, the Amazon Conservation Team has put together a partnership between Google Earth and 33 tribes, mapping their land — 70 million acres of tropical rain forest — in an effort to establish their ownership rights and protect the land from loggers.”

Mark Plotkin of Amazon Conservation Team just wrote an excellent piece for Harvard magazine about Alexander Hamilton Rice, a true Harvard man who traversed and mapped enormous tracts of Amazonian rainforest in the first quarter of the twentieth century. An excerpt:

“Thus perhaps the most consequential moment of his Harvard career was Commencement day in 1915, when the ‘explorer of tropical America, who heard the wild call of nature and revealed her hiding-place’ received an honorary degree and met Titanic survivor Eleanor Elkins Widener, present for the dedication of the library named for her drowned son. Rice and Widener married later that year and soon set out together for South America; her vast fortune expanded the scope and scale of his fieldwork and supercharged his career.”